I’m definitely a fan of TagTime, I love the principles behind it and I like the the fact that it requires minimal effort to track every activity at a reasonable precision on the long run.
However I have some problems beeminding my tags, for some reason I’ve limited myself to do-less goals with TagTime input e.g. time spent watching TV, although it does not seem to be a perfect fit as my daily limit is lower than the standard TagTime gap of 45 minutes and therefore a seemingly stable goal can derail by two pings.
I’m not sure why I have no do-more goals with TagTime input as this seems to be a better fit.
Therefore I’m very interested in other people’s goals which are based on TagTime.
So many things! Hours worked, time spent in email, time spent with my kids, time on various projects, time spent playing online scrabble with my grandma, time spent coding, time spent distracted by something that (on reflection when the ping happens) I didn’t want to be doing, time spent sleeping (yes, I fill in all the pings every morning that I didn’t answer because I was asleep – if I was in bed but not asleep then I hear the ping and actually grab my phone and answer it).
Most of those I have my yellow brick road dialed so conservatively that I don’t have to think about them. I’m just gathering data and making graphs. Having beemergency pings is stressful and I think most people hate it. Personally I thrive on that kind of stress. I’m so into having beemergency TagTime pings that I made mind.tagti.me for keeping track of the odds that I’ll make it.
My favorite recent TagTime-fed Beeminder goal that I actually skate the edge of is the following:
Most of these are just for tracking. When they’re not, I make sure that they start notifying me 7 days ahead of the deadline, cause unlike Danny, I really dislike having a TagTime Beemergency! I treat having fewer than 7 days of buffer on a TimeTime goal as something that needs addressing.
DO LESS
To avoid
– Untracked time (or time I’m unsure about because I had to enter it retroactively since I didn’t track it at the time; mary/tag-blackout)
To moderate
– Time spend online, not cause it’s bad, but just cause I want to moderate it (mary/tag-online)
– Time spend fiddling with QS systems (so that I don’t end up spending more time maintaining systems than I spend on the things they’re designed to keep me doing; mary/tag-qs)
– Time spent watching Netflix, YouTube, etc. Not b/c I think it’s inherently bad, but because I want to encourage other kinds of leisure. Though, I’ve let this goal get pretty loose since I like to have something in the background while I’m doing mindless tasks (mary/tag-watch)
Not really in use at the moment:
– Time I spend distracted (either by an internal or external distraction; mary/tag-distracted)
– Time I spend on a break when I’d booked myself to be working in my calendar (mary/tag-unscheduledbreaks)
To-Be-Dones
– Time spent planning (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly; (mary/tag-plan)
– Time spent processing inboxes of various types (probably needs updating, since there are things that aren’t getting caught by this that should be; (mary/tag-processing)
– Time spent on instrumental tasks, like paperwork, financial items, etc. (mary/tag-instrumental)
Health
– Time spent on health-promoting tasks (mary/tag-health)
– Time spent in bed, trying to sleep (mary/tag-inbed)
– Time spent on mental-health-promoting activities (mary/tag-meh)
Projects and Hobbies
– Time spent learning coding (mary/tag-coding)
– Time spend working on a game project (mary/tag-game)
– Time spent on varied leisure activities (mary/tag-leisure)
– Time spent practicing pool (mary/tag-pool)
Other
– Tracking various routine items (mary/tag-routine)
– Collecting other tags that I track but don’t have a category for (mary/tag-other)